Alexander Cockburn Creators Syndicate 09.20.01


 Don’t give into fear
Panic and indignity are the currency of revenge


"America roused to a righteous anger has always
been a force for good. States that have been
supporting if not Osama bin Laden, people like him,
need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or
Tehran, or whatever it takes, that is part of the
solution." Thus writes Rich Lowry, National Review
editor. 

"Or whatever it takes." How many cities are we
supposed to flatten? Is the revenge ratio for our
lost 5,000 to be 500,000? America’s official reaction
to this most horrible of crimes, wrought almost
entirely against a civilian population, has been of a
nature calculated to magnify an already dreadful
disaster and further exhilarate the foe. 

On this point, be instructed by a fine, but sadly
rare example. On the morning of Sept. 11, Judge
Henry Wood was trying, of all things, an American
airline crash damage case in Federal District court
in Little Rock, Ark. In the wake of the attacks there
were orders to close the courthouse. All obeyed,
except Judge Wood, aged 83, who insisted that the
jury, lawyers and attendants remain in place.
Turning down a plea for mistrial by the defendant,
Wood said, "This looks like an intelligent jury to me,
and I didn’t want the judicial system interrupted by
a terrorist act, no matter how horrible." 

Wood’s was the proper reaction. Why on earth
close the Minnesota state legislature? If Gov. Jesse
Ventura was truly an independent spirit, he would
have insisted it remain open. America could do with
more of what used to be called the Roman virtues.
Why shut the schools and then proclaim counseling
sessions in which, presumably, to instruct children
that the world can be a bad place? And what is all
this foolish talk about "vulnerability" and "a change
in the way Americans feel"? A monstrous thing
happened in New York, but should this be a cause
for a change in national consciousness? Is America
so frail? People talk of the trauma of another Pearl
Harbor but, truth to say, the trauma in the
aftermath of the day of infamy in 1941 was far in
excess of what the circumstances warranted, and
assiduously fanned by the government for reasons
of state. Ask the Japanese Americans who were
interned. 

Why, for that matter, ground all air traffic and
semi-paralyze the economy for four days, with
further interminable and useless inconveniences
promised travelers in the months and possibly years
to come? Could any terrorist have hoped not only
to bring down the Trade Center towers but also
destroy the airline industry? It would have been far
better to ask passengers to form popular defense
committees on every plane, bring their own food
and drink, keep alert for trouble and look after
themselves. A properly vigilant democracy in the
air. Remember, even if there were no x-ray
machines, no searches, no passenger checks, it
would still be far more dangerous to drive to the
airport than to get on a plane. 

Martyrdom is hard to beat. In the first few
centuries after Christ the Romans tried it against
the Christians, whose martyrdoms were almost
entirely sacrificial of themselves, not of others. The
lust for heaven of a Muslim intent on suicidal
martyrdom was surely never so eloquent as that of
St. Ignatius in the second century, who, under
sentence of death, doomed to the Roman
amphitheater and a hungry lion, wrote in his Epistle
to the Romans: "I bid all men know that of my own
free will I die for God, unless ye should hinder me
... Let me be given to the wild beasts, for through
them I can attain unto God. I am God’s wheat, and
I am ground by the wild beasts that I may be found
the pure bread of Christ. Entice the wild beasts
that they may become my sepulcher ... Come fire
and cross and grapplings with wild beasts,
wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of
my whole body; only be it mine to attain unto
Jesus Christ." 

Eventually, haughty imperial Rome made its
accommodation with Christians, just as Christians
amid the furies and martyrdoms and proscriptions of
the Reformation, made accommodations with each
other. What sort of accommodation should America
make right now? How about one with the history of
the past one hundred years, in an effort to improve
the moral world climate of the next one hundred
years? I use the word accommodation in the sense
of an effort to get to grips with history, as inflicted
by the powerful upon the weak. We have been
miserably failed by our national media here, as Jude
Wanniski, political economist and agitator of
conventional thinking, remarked in the course of a
well-merited attack on "bipartisanship," which
almost always means obdurate determination to
pursue a course of collective folly without debate:
"It is because of this bipartisanship that our press
corps has become blind to the evil acts we commit
as a nation." 

A great nation does not respond to a single hour of
terrible mayhem in two cities by hog-tying itself
with new repressive laws and abuses of
constitutional freedoms, like Gulliver doing the work
of the Lilliputians and lashing himself to the ground
with a thousand cords. Nor does it demean itself
with mad talk of firing off tactical nuclear weapons
at puny foes like bin Laden, himself assisted onto
the stage of history by the Central Intelligence
Agency. 

A great nation reflects carefully, takes prudent
measures, reassesses the risks to which it has
exposed its citizens by previous policies that may
have been foolish. America has great enemies
circling the campfires and threatening the public
good. They were rampant the day before the Sept.
11 attacks, with the prospect of deflation, sated
world markets, idled capacity, shrinking social
services. Is ranting about Kabul, attacking the Bill
of Rights and throwing money at the Pentagon the
best way forward?